Interesting Photo of the Day: Invisible Girl

December 16, 2017

Throughout photography’s history, mirrors have often been used to create spooky or magical effects. In the age of Photoshop, it can be difficult to tell if computers have been used to trick the viewer, or if the image was simply the work of a clever photographer. Today’s photo is just such an image. Photographer Laura Williams (who is also the model in the photo) titled it “Invisible” and, whether the image has been Photoshopped or not, it certainly begs the viewer to look closer and figure out what’s going on:

Laura Williams’ photograph “Invisible” of a girl vanishing behind a mirror, taken with a Nikon D5100 (Imgur)

What do you think? How did Laura Williams create this evocative image?

The best comment so far has been: “Pretty good photography skills.. for a vampire”

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11 responses to “Interesting Photo of the Day: Invisible Girl”

I would analyze such a photo from three angles. First I would enlarge the photo to look for pixelation, a mismatch in density of the host and pasted images. Since I am working from iPhone, I wasn’t able to get the required enlargement size.
Second, I would look at lighting. The base image includes a distinct shadow to the left of the subject (her right). If the image in the mirror were a true reflection of a live image, I might have expected to notice a difference in the direction of contrast for the grass.
Third, from my own experience in using mirrors, I have learned some good lessons in depth-of-field. It is quite common that the final image in the mirror does not align with the one our eyes see when taking the photo.
Having said all of that, I would say the image has been very nicely manipulated.

I believe it’s ‘shopped…in part because the legs aren’t visible in the reflection. But also because she tagged the photo “photoshop” on Flickr. Okay…I cheated on that last part. But let’s be honest…it’s a conceptual portrait and a damn good one at that. It’s fun to figure out whether it was photoshopped or handled in-camera. But in the end, that doesn’t take away from the beauty of the image. It’s still a fantastic portrait. If done well, I don’t care about the methodology. And this one is done well.

I hope my comment was not taken in a negative sense. I ceased to be as negative about manipulated images after seeing the exhibit “Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop”. There was a lot more using of (what I’ve seen called) “protoshop” than most people realized during the heyday of film. Furthermore, photography is a form of art and you don’t see many people gripe about artistic license about other forms of visual art.

I think it’s at least 2 pictures: one of the background and one of her sitting there. then she replaced whatever was within the mirror’s frame with the first image and that’s it. no worries about dof or resolution.

Art is art. Digital art allows an artist to capture any concept that he or she desires to present an illusion or an idea to the viewers. This is an awesome piece of work. Would love to see more of her work. Great job…..

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